A handful of professors in the University System of Georgia are a bit miffed. It seems that they believe an individual’s right to keep and bear arms should end at the campus borders. They believe it so much that they’ve filed a lawsuit to block Georgia’s campus carry law.

Six Georgia professors filed suit in state court Monday to stop a law that allows licensed concealed carriers to bring guns onto campus.

The complaint, brought against Governor Nathan Deal and Attorney General Chris Carr, argues that the state’s guns-on-campus law infringes on the University System of Georgia’s authority over its 30 schools.

In July, Georgia became the 12th state to allow concealed guns on college campuses. Governor Deal signed the campus-carry bill a year after issuing an emphatic veto that invoked the Founding Fathers’ aversion to weaponry in institutions of higher learning, language that the plaintiffs reference in their suit.

The plaintiffs say that with the advent of campus carry, they don’t have autonomy over their classrooms, and several maintain that guns make learning environments less safe. One University of Georgia geography professor is described in the complaint as a gun owner and said guns on campus “negatively impact his educational mission.” A tenured professor at Valdosta State University said he’s altered his teaching practices in response to the law, discontinuing in-person office hours and transitioning his core courses to an online format. Another Valdosta State professor said he “regularly encounters emotionally and psychologically distressed students,” including one who committed suicide.

Good luck.

Georgia is a state with a dominantly gun-friendly populace that tends to have gun-friendly judges. Further, their arguments are absolute nonsense.

As reported here at Bearing Arms recently, Texas just passed their one-year mark of campus carry, with no negative incidents to report. Further, Utah has had campus carry for a number of years, again, all without incident.

For the professors’ arguments to have any merit, they should at least be able to point to a number of incidents in any of the other 11 states with campus carry laws to show how dangerous it is for faculty on college campuses. They won’t.

They won’t because they can’t. Law abiding gun owners are not the problem, nor have we ever been the problem. The problem always has been the non-law abiding people who can, will, and have ignored gun laws requiring firearms to be kept off campus. As noted in the post about Texas, that’s still happening, but it was happening before and these are all cases where it would have been illegal for them to have that gun on campus regardless.

At no point are professors being gunned down for bad grades, snarky remarks, or anything in campus carry states. But you know what else isn’t happening in those states? Maniacs like the gunman at Virginia Tech aren’t trotting around campus killing people, knowing that the police are long minutes away. More than enough time for such a madman to kill anyone he can find.

It’s not happening because those inclined to do so know they may meet armed resistance early and not rack up their precious body count.

If professors want to be terrified, that’s on them. However, they’re scared over nothing, and if these supposedly intelligent people would simply look at the facts, they know it.

Unfortunately for them, it’s unlikely the judicial body of the State of Georgia–or the Supreme Court of the United States–is likely to side with them on this topic.